Saturday, 15 December 2012

Philosophy Lite

Some of the
statistics released this week from the National Census reinforced the
widespread preconception that our country is being overrun by immigrants who
come here to take our jobs and houses and, instead of being grateful, introduce
their foreign cultural mores and upset our established and perfectly honed way
of life. Any number of anecdotes can be conjured up to illustrate this story
and to confirm the stereotypes associated with it.

But we like stereotypes
because they help us make sense of life: they tidy everything - and everybody -
into clearly labelled, instantly recognisable pigeonholes. We do like to know precisely
which group we belong to and how it differs from others so that we can be
confident in our dealings with them. And when something or someone conforms to stereotype,
it is comforting to know that we were right all along.

With this in
mind I attended a public lectureentitled
" Divergence and Convergence:Traditional
Chinese and Western Modes of Thinking" given by Dr. Keekok Lee,
Professor of Philosophy. I have long been aware that, in some
fundamental but esoteric way, the Chinese approach to life is 'different' from
ours so I took this opportunity to gain some understanding of how and why.

Although I
took my seat feeling smugly pleased with my open-minded attitude, I was inevitably
confronted by my own prejudices. To start with, the Professor was not a middle
aged, pipe-smoking man but a tiny, grey-haired lady! Then there was the fact
that she was Chinese, which obviously accounted for her diminutive physical presence;
my observation that she was bizarrely dressed, proving, beyond doubt, that her
mind was on a higher plane; the impression that she gave of being slightly
batty, which always accords with professorship; and her self-confessed technical
incompetence vis-à-vis Powerpoint which, as we all know, is only to be expected of an
old-fashioned book-worm. All the boxes were ticked.

And then, with
a set of props comprising three projected 'slides', a pair of chopsticks and a
glass, half-full or (crucial to the argument) half-empty, she put her case.
Here it is in summary:

The Chinese
started thinking in an organised way 8,000 years ago - long before the West.

Chinese
logic is based on the principles of Yin-Yang or I-Ching which both assert that reality
has variable positions: nothing is simply black or white. This she somehow
likened to the movement of chopsticks, one of which is held firm while the
other moves against it.

Westerners
only got started 2,000 years ago when Aristotle popped up. Greek philosophers
initiated a system of thought which is binary: something either is or is not.
But how do you then describe the glass containing water? It must surely be
either one or the other. It cannot be both. Duh!

But the
Danish Physicist Nils Bohr proved, in the 1940's, that some atoms exist as both
particle and wave simultaneously: ie they are neither one nor the other - they
are both!

Since then
the West has been converging towards the Chinese model (which, of course, has
been reassuringly correct all along) and has contrived a new name for it - “Fuzzy
Logic”.

The enlightenment I seek is elusive:
as of now I remain inclined towards the stereotype of the Chinese thought
process being evasive and duplicitous. Lacking an appetite for in-depth study,
however, the best argument I can muster is the following succinct précis of the development of the Western
thought system in recent times:

"to do is to be" - Kant

"to be is to do" -
Nietzsche

"do be do be do" – Sinatra

which clearly demonstrates divergence
as opposed to convergence: or, perhaps, a schizophrenic breakdown suffered as a
result of this whole argument.